 | Mark Twain's sketches, new and old |  |
MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE.
I WAS a very smart child at the age of thirteen—an unusually smart child, I
thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and
most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in the community. It
did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was a printer's “devil,” and a
progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal
Journal, two dollars a year in advance—five hundred subscribers, and they
paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's
day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one
issue of the paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor
on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open
note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could no longer endure
life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and
discovered Higgins wading back to shore! He had concluded he wouldn't. The
village was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought
this was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole
matter, and then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of
wooden type with a jack-knife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into
the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a
walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious
that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with
this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it
would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country
and “see him squirm.”
I did it, putting the article into the
form of a parody on the Burial of “Sir
John Moore”—and a pretty crude
parody it was, too.
Then I lampooned two prominent
citizens outrageously—not because
they had done anything to deserve it,
but merely because I thought it was
my duty to make the paper lively.
Next I gently touched up the newest
stranger—the lion of the day, the
gorgeous journeyman tailor from
Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb
of the first water, and the
“loudest” dressed man in the State.
He was an inveterate woman-killer.
Every week he wrote lushy “poetry”
for the “Journal,” about his newest
conquest. His rhymes for my week
were headed, “To Mary in H— l,”
meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of
course. But while setting up the
piece I was suddenly riven from
head to heel by what I regarded as a
perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I
compressed it into a snappy foot-note
at the bottom—thus:—“We will let this
thing pass, just this once; but we wish
Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand
distinctly that we have a character to
h—l, he must select some other medium than the columns of this journal!”
The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much attention
as those playful trifles of mine.
For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand—a novelty it had not experienced
before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in with a double-barrelled
shot-gun early in the forenoon. When he found that it was an infant (as he called
me) that had done him the damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away; but
he threw up his situation that night and left town for good. The tailor came with
his goose and a pair of shears; but he despised me too, and departed for the South
that night. The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went away
incensed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with a warwhoop
next day, suffering for blood to drink; but he ended by forgiving me cordially and
inviting me down to the drug store to wash away all animosity in a friendly bumper
of “Fahnestock's Vermifuge.” It was his little joke. My uncle was very angry
when he got back—unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had
given the paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to
have been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so wonderfully
escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off. But he
softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the
unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to
show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run the
family for two years!
| Mark Twain's sketches, new and old | |